Digital Marketing 2.0: Strategies from Razorpay’s Deepak Kanakaraju

Razorpay is a company that “aims to revolutionise online payments by providing clean, developer-friendly APIs and hassle-free integration.” At TechSparks 2016, the company’s Head of Digital Marketing, Deepak Kanakaraju, spoke about the rising importance of digital marketing in the Indian startup ecosystem.

Prior to addressing the topic in-depth, he explained the many facets of content marketing – the backbone of the digital marketing world at large. Traffic being a key aspect of digital marketing, Kanakaraju noted the two methods of traffic generation – Free Traffic and Paid Traffic.

Communication through content has evolved through the years, resulting in its essential presence in the startup world. “Content is the source of all attention, and attention can be monetised,” he said.

As for integrated digital marketing, Kanakaraju suggests that instead of getting paid traffic to buy customers directly, you should use it to build your own subscriber base and to get traffic back to your own blog or space.

He mentioned a basic formula that he followed – ‘Content Marketing = Owned Media + Traffic’.

Integrated digital marketing and the concept of scaling traffic revolve around ‘The long Tail’ concept, which, according to Kanakaraju, is the core of all the description that surrounds you.

Noting the importance of ‘targeting’ your ad-base, he said, In a competitive world of mainstream media covering a lot of overlapping interests, this form of media will not generate much revenue for those wishing to use digital marketing for its full potential because it isn’t as targeted. Targeting with display works best for a company like Facebook because it has all your information. When it comes to digital marketing, targeting display ads works better for a higher conversion ratio.

Although Long-Tail content distribution theory is being used in practice in almost all departments, the industries that are yet to be disrupted are those revolving around online shelf-space, physical products as well as 3D printing for small widgets.

Emphasising strategy over technique, Kanakaraju said that he uses traffic to boost content marketing. According to him, the time is ripe to use content to its maximum advantage. Citing the example of Hubspot, he spoke about how the company grew in numbers because they used all their content channels to the maximum.

Kanakaraju then revealed the prime tactics of digital marketing that one should apply to maximise their business. To him, the tactics may keep changing, but there should be increased emphasis on keyword research tools. “When you don’t own the top of the funnel, you don’t have a stable specific target group who you can base your service on,” he said.

The key features of using the tools of digital marketing to your advantage include, long tail keyword mining, long Tail Pro, Google Search Console, HitTail, User Surveys, and finally, understanding the market by talking to people and reading their comments.

Specifically addressing B2B marketing, he said, “When it comes to B2B Marketing, the target audience is so small as compared to B2C that their biggest challenge becomes targeting issues when it comes to paid advertising. If you want to scale up, targeting people based on their interests and likes (target market) – using long tail methods – is easier than going to paid traffic. Using long tail keyword is much easier for B2B than paid advertising. He said,

You have to experiment, you have to know where your blog stands in the competitive market, so go long tail.